Milton Berle Heckled by Muppets Statler & Waldorf | Hilarious Video

Milton Berle was a character all right! I spent many crazy Sundays in my youth with the man who was one of my Dad’s closest friends and who was Uncle Miltie to me. Here’s a classic clip from Milton Berle’s The Muppet Show appearance from 1977. In this clip, Berle attempts (with little success) to get through his opening monologue, but can’t make it past the heckling of Statler and Waldorf. This clip brings to memory Milton Berle’s uncanny sense of humor and comedic timing. What a comic he was!

In the late 1940’s, our home became the clubhouse (although my mother later told me that “madhouse” would have been a more appropriate description) where my Dad, Red Skelton, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, and others gathered almost every Sunday afternoon to barbecue hot dogs and hamburgers and to hang out with my Dad, my mother, my sister Susie, and a very young me.

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In 1951, Red launched his CBS television show that became a mainstay of network television for twenty years.

Not to be undone, Uncle Miltie (Berle) was just adapting the television version of his radio Texaco Star Theater from radio to television. When Milton Berle’s show launched in 1948, the whole medium of television was almost instantly transformed from a novelty into a national passion.

Milton Berle’s Tuesday night show was such a huge hit that he regularly attracted as much as eighty per cent of the available television audience and, in the first known instance of television’s impact on movie attendance, theater owners actually complained that fewer movie tickets were sold on Tuesdays.

Sales of television sets themselves more than doubled the year after Uncle Miltie’s show debuted. (We had no exclusivity calling him Uncle Miltie. He was known as that to everyone who watched his show.)